Hey there,
Day 7. Had Italian food delivered last night and after a week of the local slop, it might have been the tastiest meal I've ever had. And there is enough for round two today, so feeling positive. I was really gonna try to not constantly share food stuff, but have got to show this morning's breakfast.
Maybe 1/2 a scrambled egg, piece of pig, sad limp broccoli, and in almost every box, a piece of corn that is also soggy and unbuttered/flavored. It is the main course of two giant mushrooms that was baffling. They are pretty to be sure, and if they were psychedelic it would make my week. Was talking to Betty when it arrived and showed it to her. Now, she'll regularly defend these crimes against humanity, probably just to irritate me, which I respect, but even she said 'you can't eat that!'
A thing I have tried to do ever since I stopped the 9-5 is to not turn on the TV until after dinner cause I know I'd just lie there. Sports excepted of course. The show I am savoring in quarantine is Money Heist, which is a bankrobber show from Spain. If that's your bag, you'll like this.
Continuing the catch up from the summer, after I dropped B-doll off at school, Boy-o drove home and I trained it up to DC. When possible, always stay with our family friend Laurie, who is more family than friend. She always looked after the Boy during his time there and has already hosted Babydoll for a long weekend. We were talking in advance and we wanted to do something and landed on a road trip to Pittsburgh. I loved it when we had a quick visit (and famous rental car key drowning in the sewer) a handful of years ago and Laurie had never been but was on her list. She's also a baseball fan and the Pirates were in town, so off we went.
Western PA is an area I haven't spent much time in and both times ended in disaster, so was apprehensive. On the way to Pittsburgh, we stopped at Polymath Park, which has a collection of Frank Lloyd Wright houses. No photos from that but it was cool. The real FLW highlight in the area is Fallingwater, but we planned too late and they were booked solid through October. A good reason to go back that way but plan ahead. We stayed at a hotel across the river from the baseball stadium and the thing to do is to walk across the Roberto Clemente Bridge into the stadium. Such great scenery and atmosphere. The stadium itself is lovely and the views great. Is in my top 3 baseball places and could be #1 if they figured out their food choices. Stupid would be the word I'd use for those.
The Pirates stink and didn't know much about their team. There were a couple of very Japanese guys near us with a sign welcoming Yoshi. Apparently, they had just acquired Yoshi Tsutsugo and it was his first night on the team. He didn't start, but came up as a pinch hitter in the 7th and knocked a homerun. The smiles on those fans faces were priceless.
Did the Hop On/Off bus thing the next day and always love those. They uniformly do a nice job of showing you the stuff and then giving some local flavor and history around it. It was not hard to imagine the place caked in coal dust. Pittsburgh has some interesting architecture, both old and new, has the arts and sports, and with the confluence of the the three rivers, views are always framed with water and hills.
One afternoon around sundown, we walked to that point with the fountain (Point State Park) and it is a great outdoor meeting space for the town.
We rode up one of the inclines, which are old cable cars to take the coal workers up to the cheap housing on the steep hills that surround the city. The three bridges that are of same construction that line up in a row are the Roberto Clemente, Andy Warhol and Rachel Carson bridges. Rachel Carson wrote the book Silent Spring which detailed how the use of DDT was going through the food chain and causing bird eggs to not fully form, so there were no birds chirping in the Spring, hence the title of the book. And Andy Warhol was a Pittsburgh native and there is an excellent museum of his stuff. Everyone knows the Soup Cans, but there was so much more to his life. I like his stuff, but gained a new and deep appreciation of his life and highly recommend a trip there.
This isn't the Warhol, but rather Randyland, which is a colorful junk art masterpiece that is filled with bugs that bite.
We were gonna head home, but we didn't need to and started looking around the area for other things to do and landed on going to Punxsutawney. Of course we had to look for a BnB like Phil Conners and found one that was a Groundhog Day as you could imagine. Right across the street from the town square where you can visit Phil and his lady friend Phyllis' burrow.
And of course, a visit to Gobbler's Knob.
The BnB had a TV and one DVD, which we watched of course. Not much there in the non-Groundhog Day season, so the BnB was just us, but a lady comes in the morning and made us a feast for breakfast. We learned a lot about the area from her...like how she has to fight the anti-vaxxers and that her son was into taxidermy. She called us 'Yinz', which is the local version of Y'all, as in, Where yinz all heading to today? Can now check that off my bucket list.
Our last day was to head back to DC, but on the way we made a couple of stops. That area is big with the Amish and there were buggies all over the roads.
We popped into a couple of their shops in the town of Smicksberg and one of them was at an Amish couple's house where they made and sold quilts. We spent some time talking to the wife who was the sales lady while her husband was working the loom. As cliche a pair as you could hope for and of course we had to buy something. I got a pillow that unfolds into a quilt that is cleverly named a quillow. The lady told us that a widow makes them to make some scratch. The best part was the names of this couple...Fanny and Enis. Could not make those up nor think of a better pair of names for them. One thing the obviously don't make is soap cause they smelled awful.
Our other stop that day was at the Flight 93 Memorial. Very solemn and well done. The memorial details the events of the day and it overlooks the field where the plane went down. They have a gift shop and I could not understand why someone would by a hat or hoodie from it, although not much about Americans surprises me.
The Little League World Series was going on but they weren't allowing non-family in. Think that'd be a hoot to check out one of these years.
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